With maximum warming, the numbers would be 21 to 32 percent.” And this is just an estimate.Įlizabeth Rush, Rising : Dispatches from the New American Shore Some of the scientists Kolbert interviewed estimated that, if all species were able to move with warming (i.e., “universal dispersal”), “with the minimum warming projected, 9 to 13 percent of all species would be “committed to extinction” by 2050. Other species-both plant and animal-are succumbing to diseases and pests that are more prevalent in a warming wold (for example, the mountain pine beetle). Ocean species are affected by acidification caused by CO2 absorption. Other species are out-of-sync with their ecosystem, finding that, for example, the flowers they rely on for sustenance are flowering earlier, so they arrive too late to get enough food. She explains how climate change is causing species to shift up in both elevation and latitude, and that species that aren’t mobile are slowly dying out. This is critical because it contextualizes the sixth extinction, which is happening right now because of human activity.
She devotes a lot of space at the beginning of the book explaining how the idea of extinction first came about. While Kolbert’s first book was about climate change, her second-which won a Pulitzer Prize-is about extinction. Divided broadly-and subjectively!-into four sections, we kicked off yesterday with The Classics today, it’s all about science.įeatured art from Landscape Painting Now, edited by Todd Bradway, courtesy DAP.Įlizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
With contributions from the likes of Richard Powers, Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Rush, Aminatta Forna, Maja Lunde, Francesca Angiolillo, Stephen Sparks, Amy Brady, Jean-Baptiste del Amo, and many more, this collection is neither exhaustive nor fixed, and with the help of readers and writers alike, we hope to add to it in the coming months (and years, if we can). With that in mind we have come up with the beginnings of a climate change library, 365 books that show us where we’ve come from, where we’re at now, how we might survive this crisis, and how we might cope if we don’t. But if there is any hope in righting this awful course, we need to think of every day as Earth Day. In the 49 years since the first Earth Day was celebrated, human civilization-checked by neither morality nor policy-has wrecked devastation upon the planet, increasing with each passing year of excess and inaction the likelihood that coming generations will live in a world unrecognizable to Senator Gaylord Nelson, who first conceived of the day as an environmental teach-in on April 22, 1970. The idea of a single day devoted to the earth is absurd.
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